I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
In general I fully agree except with your conclusion. In the short-run efficiency immediately benefits the established players, but in the long-run it benefits, more or less literally, everybody except them. Because as you bring the price down on things you enable more efficient competition. Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
Software is a very clear example on this front. Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people. It's just that tools, markets, and more have made it possible for even single developers to have an absurd degree of efficiency. And LLMs are probably going to bump this up exponentially.
This is why a metaphor I'm currently drawn to is one of people living in a very agrarian society just prior to the Industrial Revolution. What would they have envisioned being created? Super farms of course. And those super farms were indeed created, but the overall impact was such that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top. That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
> when you start moving things away from LA to "save money"
Economic hubs work when there is more efficiency to be found in industrially-codependent resources being located close to each other, than there is in cheaper labor costs outside the hub. Hollywood's heyday was when there was enormous value to putting actors, agents, producers, cameras, sets, editors, VFX, writers all within close driving distance of each other, so that you could organize new movies and shows at the drop of a hat. In a day and age when teenagers are able to use cellphone cameras and pocketmoney to produce stories that are compelling enough to command attention and advertising dollars, the value of that geographic proximity has declined tremendously.
AI didn't build the coffin, but it's been putting nails in it.
I don't find either of these charts dispositive by themselves. The cost of healthcare, education, housing, transportation, and insurance have easily outpaced any growth in wages. Another facet of this debate is that cheaper goods aren't necessarily of equal or better quality.
> the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen
Hooray for just-in-time scheduling where workers have to be available full time but rarely get scheduled full time. It’s an innovation that has been great for capital and terrible for labor.
People are earning about 12% more and working about 5% less since 1980, but everything costs roughly 3x what it did in 1980 relative to wages, and that's where most people are pinched.
Upvote for bringing data, since I did not. That said, that quote was in reference to AI, so referred to the past 3-4 years. And of course, our money today is not worth as much as it was 20+ years ago. Also many important goods and services increased in price at a higher rate than inflation or wage increases. It might be interesting to look at such industries for a history of consolidation or PE-involvement.
Nicely sliced. Weekly wages for full time workers have been rising for decades while fewer workers work full time. I don't think this data backs your assertion.
Why? AI is taking jobs. getty images just filed bankruptcy, stackoverflow went from heavy use to almost no use. AI is taking jobs, tipping toeing around it isn't the best thing. It needs to be said, and then what next needs to be figured out because first we talk about 200k jobs, then we will next talk about 2 million and then 20million
Or not. Significant shifts in the nature of emplyoment are undoubtably disruptive, but there's no particular reason to believe this one will result in mass unemployment any more than previous shifts have done so.
Especially if we're talking about jobs in creative industries that require customers with the means to support and consume their output.
Besides, an overabundance of surplus labor, if properly managed, is as likely to lead to a better world than a worse one. There's no ironclad rule that everyone, or even the majority, need to work to live or live to work to be happy. And many creatives, in particular, would be happy and productive working on personal and noncommercial projects if funding were no longer an issue.
> AI is taking jobs, tipping toeing around it isn't the best thing. It needs to be said, and then what next needs to be figured out
If we think about it, AI can be seen as dumping cheap products below cost and disrupting the domestic market.
I mean the real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright laws in many cases and even if we discount that, it is well known that AI is being pushed far below the actual costs for providers. There are disruptive technologies, yes but this is not the same if the real cost is hidden or deferred and it doesn't compare with horses/cars or whatever analogy that comes up often.
In the physical world, this is called dumping isn't it? Just because tech is involved it doesn't change the fact. Countries already have anti dumping laws.
I live in Atlanta ("y'allywood"), a formerly big LA film outsourcing location. They shot much of Marvel and Netflix stuff here pre-2023. The unit below me has been rented to Winona Ryder and Dave Bautista.
Beyond that, my hobby is film and I know tons of people in the industry. I've made indie films with them.
All the jobs have gone to Europe. It's simply cheaper to film there now. Amazon and Netflix built infrastructure and taught local crews how during the pandemic content wars.
Looking at my Gen Z wife, all the eyeballs have gone to TikTok.
Economists keep saying over and over that so far AI has had minimal impact on the economy. That may change in time, but we aren’t seeing massive losses as a result of AI, despite some C suites using that as an excuse to lay off after over hiring.
Maybe a lot of people worked at stackoverflow idk;
but I have been organising electronic “underground” music nights for 15+ years and basically stopped now because there just wasn’t a big enough audience anymore.
Anyway what I’m trying to say is that I think COVID and its aftermath is a much bigger factor here than AI, especially when it comes to “live / performing” art
To use your example of the movie industry, everyone gets the benefits of the effiency gains.
There's twice as many scripted shows today and twice as many movies released despite the average person spending half the time they did 30 years ago watching TV and movies. For less than the price of a 1990s cable tv subscription we can access almost any movie, instantly streamed to our HDR TVs at home, on demand. The digital VFX we expect of a low tier direct to streaming show are better than the some of the best 90s movies (practical effects excluded).
There are hundreds of thousands of people across the world using the 4k camera in their pocket they bought for a few hundred dollars to make hyper specific media and distributing it free on YouTube. They are editing it in cheap or free video editors on their computer or built in to their phone.
It's easy to shit on modern media. With democratization comes slop. There's garbage now just like there was before. But we are absolutely benefitting off the efficency gains of the last few decades.
Modern technology makes distribution free, so then you need to compete on brand and quality.
Outsourcing seems extremely short-sighted in this environment. You're devaluing your brand, and giving expertise and training to another place that can make their own products.
I also wonder how much can be attributed to weakened intellectual property protection. Comments in this thread say they don't pay for anything because they can watch it all for free.
Rhythm and Hues (Oscar award winner for “Life of Pi”) was killed because it was cheaper to move that work offshore.
Sure, we can blame AI for a lot of crimes, but let’s start with the people who offshore everything first. Then when those offshore people get fired because of AI, you don’t feel so bad because it’s not like you’re firing anyone or killing any companies in the same country, right?
At the end of the day, what is the functional difference between offshoring and AI? People in this country still get fired and can’t find work, because the work is no longer done in this country. And then later, much of this work is no longer done by humans in any country.
> I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
...because nothing in it supported the thesis?
Print and audio/video have been showing clear declines since the 90s, thanks to the death of print, CDs and cable. Maybe AI is part of this, maybe not, but if it is, we're talking about a slight change in slope. These industries were walking dead before CNNs were a thing.
The one industry where you'd expect to see the clearest impact (coding) is basically flat.
FWIW, there was a very good recent NY Times opinion piece titled "I Teach at a Business School. It's Time to Shut Them Down." by a professor at the University of Cambridge business school who argues that these schools have solely promulgated this idea of "efficiency" as their primary output to the detriment of society at large. Worth a read if you're interested in the topic.
Consider "The Red Queen" by Ridley book. It's premise is that evolution constantly improves a species, but since other species also are improving, the species runs and runs but stays in the same place.
It's the same thing in business. One has to relentlessly decrease the cost of doing business, because your competitors are doing it as well. You run and run and stay in the same place.
I haven't read the cited article, but the professor would need to show that industry profit margins are increasing to make his point. I haven't seen any evidence that margins increased in general.
Yes, it definitely can. That's sort of why I kept putting it in scarequotes. I am not skeptic of AI, fwiw. Mostly just our current crop of corpo/gov leadership and their views on what healthy economy looks like.
You raise a good point, but I would like to add more nuance. Traditional TV is largely displaced by YouTube (small content creators) and streaming (Netflix, etc.) Traditional film has moved nearly entirely to streaming, but there is more of it now than ever before. TikTok is something truly generational to me. Just like Instagram largely killed the blog because it allowed normies to watch the amazing lives of the top 5%. TikTok allows young people (mostly women) to gossip faster than ever before.
The legacy media industry had a huge amount of fat and inefficiency, lots of people sitting around pretending to work. Joe Rogan produces a top podcast that pulls a larger audience than the vast majority of TV shows, and does everything with about 5 employees. Regardless of what you think of him personally or the podcast content, that is amazing efficiency. And he started it before LLMs were even a thing.
While I suspect you're not wrong about either inefficiency in large, well-funded media organziations or the efficiency of Rogan's operation, comparing his podcast to anything but a substantially similar TV show is hardly a fair comparison. Even a relatively low-budget scripted TV series is going to require a cast, writers, props, sets, costumes, hair and makeup, lighting, camera work, craft services, transportation, significantly more editing and postproduction, the list goes on, plus directors and producers and administrative personnel to manage all of this.
That's not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison. The inputs for an unscripted podcast are vastly different from a scripted TV show. They're different mediums for expression, and each carries different costs.
I can’t speak to everyone, but grok bot is helping me gain so much efficiency in managing all of the things that I have going on in my life that I feel much more present now.
Before I’d always feel distracted by things weighing on me that I needed to get done. Now a huge load of those things are asked of grok bot quickly, then I close the laptop and go spend time where I should be.
It feels like it’s lifting a huge burden from my daily life.
The article is well-written and well-informed, but it's hard to really see the impact of AI just by looking at the data. Even the author attributes most of the job losses to factors other than AI, and even when AI use in the industry is clearly discussed, it's hard to draw any clear connection to job losses.
Maybe we haven't had enough time to see the full impact, but right now, most job losses seem to be attributable to shifting consumption habits and a supply of content (both professional and amateur) that vastly outweighs demand.
Before AI showed up the UN released a report on the Attention Economy. It said Supply of content had vastly outstripped Demand. It decoupled because entertainment/media was being used to push other products. The telcos, amazon, google/fb and many others were all subsidizing content to push some other product. Exploding info chasing finite non growing eyeballs and time.
Creative content will become more personal and less profitable, art being some sort of commercial enterprise is a relative new phenomenon, we will survive without it. Most artists will have to generate income by performance or physical creation, just like it has been for the whole time before it was commoditized to feed the "attention economy"
What a gross and completly apt terminology for the commoditization of art from the bureaucrats by the way.
I'm looking at gaming these days and there's such an endless selection of excellent games I'd love to play. But there are far more great games than I have time to play. So when I see stuff like using AI to make games faster, I can only think what is the point, The market won't buy or play more games so something else has to give.
I feel completely the opposite. Mind, I play games a fair bit, but I generally don't feel that excited about most, and I'd say a lot of them have very repetitive tropes. I'm generally in the market for 30h+ spent on a game, so that filters out a lot of the more trendy stuff.
Online games though you pretty much have to follow the herds to the newest titles. You could stick around but it usually isn't pretty: tough to find full lobbies or full of sweats or both.
I started building a game on a custom engine a few years ago and I used to think about selling it, but nowadays the market is so oversaturated I tend to think of it as nothing more than a coding exercise.
Same thing here. I gave up on gaming all together because my library grew too much. As a kid, I didn’t even own a console, I had to borrow gameboy or go to my friend house and even then it was just an handful of cartridges. Even now, I plan to just focus on small sample of programming languages and ecosystems, and learn them inside out. There’s just too much stuff out there.
It's also very easy to make high quality content. You can record a professional album with 5000$ in gear. Live instruments and all.
You can make your album accessible to every human on earth for free.
So my Instagram is full of very very high quality music, much of it I'll only listen to once.
Music from all over the world.
Its great.
Yet sad. So much music I'll never get to. I have to spend 40 to 50 hours a week generating income. If only I did better on that Meta interview way back.
I'd be retired now, free to indulge in endless entertainment.
There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
> When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.
Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.
> There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
It isn't exactly a desert? It is more like a full buffet, but nothing but cheap, mass-produced sugar literally everywhere. All the 2-star donuts and chocolate cupcakes you can eat, and nothing but that.
I would look to the culture industry in Japan as an alternative to the gatekeeping-industrial complex we call Hollywood.
Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.
Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.
The real job losses are probably in commercial art. If you're making an illustration for an ad, that's almost certainly automated now. Looking at when the decline started, it's about when Stable Diffusion got going.
Some of this stuff is pre-AI, Photoshop smart tools stuff. Especially clothing ads. Nobody has a live model pose with each item color any more. Or even each item. (I used to know actress/model/waitress types in LA who did that. Grind job: "OK, the blue sweater is next, and hurry it up, we have 50 to do before lunch". But it paid OK.)
I just don't pay for it. If there's something I really wanna watch I might buy one month of the service binge it then cancel.
The streaming model has imho mostly killed old style television formats with the new way of hyping up a show in the first couple episodes by tossing money and talent, then leave people to hang with unsatisfying conclusions once you've got that sub money. It's all about convincing people to sign up and stay signed up with promises for new content. The quality of the content doesn't matter as long as there's a lot of it and it's enough to keep people from unsubscribing.
With traditional TV your value was directly determined by how many people were watching so you could sell addspace. And despite there being less choice and harder for independent players to get time, in some ways it was weirdly more democratic because if a show sucked or an episode sucked people would just change the channel or watch something else. With streaming they still do that but it's all in the same price scheme so doesn't hurt their bottom line. They're incentivised to just crank out as much crap as possible to keep subs up. Won't last.
In the US, there are a lot more rich people than there used to be [1] and they're often driving prices up because they can afford to pay. (Most obviously in real estate.)
If certain ultra conservative countries don’t like LGBT representation they don’t get to be in your major movie.
At this point I don’t know the difference between Chat GPT writing the next marvel movie or Disney hiring someone. Either way the story needs to be crystal clear. You never watch something that makes you think.
It feels like all media, from tv shows to movies are all following a certain formula, with a goal to drive a certain social perspective about people and society.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I stopped watching broadcast/cable TV 20 years ago. I had Netflix until they switched to their own content and started raising rates, so I dropped it. I now rent DVDs from a place about 15 minutes from me. I also have Kanopy for free. Here’s the opinion: stop watching. That’s the only way to send a message. Read a book. Rent a dvd. Or play a game. Or draw. Or visit friends and play board games. Or learn to play an instrument. Or find a game store near you and go to game nights. Or bowl. Find something else to do than drool at a screen watching content product that doesn’t give a shit about. Right now I’m doing advent of code from 2019 in LISP. Haven’t programmed lisp since college and I’m having a blast. Get a hobby. Screw the media machine.
That is a real reason I can't summon the interest to subscribe to any of them: Whatever I pick, I'll be dissatisfied, so I put it off for another day...
If only there was a service where you paid a fixed price for a bundle and you had a set top box that had all these channels together in one package. Of course you'd have a lot of channels you never looked at but overall it would be more efficient.
I think we are still in a hangover from the financial cocaine the governments were handing out during the pandemic (and even long after it was a problem).
Also, nobody has any time for entertainment. Office workers all working 80 hours a week fearing stack ranking, PIPs, layoffs, needing to scramble to get a new H1B job or risk getting kicked out of the country and having to uproot kids. Service workers are working 120 hours a week across 3 jobs. Single people are working 100+ hours a week studying and interviewing and not getting jobs.
While this may be true for some people, overall this is not backed up by the data.
The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.
Interesting, I have seen people be stretched thin and more stretched but I haven't seen people working 80-120 hour weeks. Different circles maybe?
I do feel for anyone trying to find a new H1B sponsor. I've lived and worker as a foreigner before, its stressful for sure. It is also a tough spot for a country to be in, if your domestic labor is struggling to find or keep jobs itsnhard to justify continuing protections for foreign labor.
Not true. If you look at any “cheap entertainment” dashboard, you’ll see usage has been going up.
My hypothesis is, YT, Reels and TT are eating everyone’s lunch, as people spend more time on those. And for people who don’t watch much, there’s Spotify. Basically attention span degradation across all age groups.
> So based on that, we believe what is most fair is to put current trends in because you cannot predict at what point consumers and demand is going to be -- you're going to begin to see demand destruction based on the pricing environment.
The framing of job "loses" is irrationally pessimistic.
When a job is no longer required, it means we (humanity) managed to do something clever to get it done with less labour - a great achievement!
This frees up those involved in that job to pursue other work, increases supply, and drives down prices - i.e. society overall experiences an increase in standards of living.
The only negatives are on the individual who's laid off through 1. frictional unemployment (the hardship someone goes through when switching jobs), and 2. potential salary reduction as they go from a lucrative job to being a newbie in their new career. But like any career, they can build that up again.
The best mindset is not to take any job/salary for granted in the first place, as it's not someone else's responsibility to employ us.
But layoffs only occur if firms can produce output at a lower cost by using AI rather than humans. Those humans go and work elsewhere and total output increases.
Try LLMing this (it efficiently interrogates both your assumptions in a single prompt):
> in standard economic thinking, is it possible for a job to be made redundant due to improvements in technology and that employee to be reassigned elsewhere, and for either long run supply to go down or long run prices to go up?
Note: there will always be edge cases, for example if I owned a business, I could theoretically replace someone with AI, and increase my prices, which would contradict the idea that greater efficiency always results in more supply and lower prices, but overall in the long-run that won't happen.
I do think certain tax incentives to create jobs, contractual obligations between employer and employee and legal restrictions on termination of employment can create a condition where someone is responsible for employing you.
I was wondering about this recently. I visited my parents in Italy and got to watch some TV with them (at home we don't have the TV even connected to the Antenna as it is only for YT or through the media center).
I noticed that a good percentage (between 30 and 50%) is AI generated and I was wondering what impact it had on the actors/musicians/... . I mean, with a few 10s of Euros now you can achieve something that before it would've costed you several thousands or tens of thousands (depends on the quality of the production I guess).
I assumed at the time it must've been a slaughter for that part of the gig economy and this seems to confirm it.
This 100%. All the layoffs started before AI. High interest rates means businesses can't afford to take risks. Our entire economy is based on easy money from cheap debt. The tech layoffs are about being able to pay for AI whether that's paying for data centers or tokens.
I expect AI use to cause an increase in output, not a decrease in employment. At least right now. In TV and Film it would translate to more content that was too expensive to film before. If your business is making movies and then suddenly the market is flooded with fast and cheap movies, then you're going to make more fast and cheap movies too!
That doesn't explain anything in this article. All the time series go back to 1990 when interest rates were significantly higher any way you look at them.
> And unlike a lot of things, media doesn't expire. I still regularly find albums, movies, and books from decades ago I enjoy today.
Media doesn't expire, but with increasing distance to the cultural context it was created in, enjoying any work in all its nuances becomes harder. Take for example Arrested Development - one of the funniest TV shows of this century, but unless you bring sufficient knowledge on the Bush Jr. administration, you'll miss the funniest layers of many jokes and stories.
And it gets all the more interesting to look back at how the Zeitgeist changed over time, as tropes evolve and tastes keep changing.
Maybe. As a contrast, look at the book industry. We have access to 500+ years of books digitally, and yet most people prefer to read books written in the last 50 years.
The point stands, the over supply is a huge factor. There’s so much content available that serves as a competitive/substitute for traditional film and tv that it changes the entire consumer behavior and economy around the industry, which translates to jobs.
I don’t think people will ever really want to only watch old stuff, or lack desire for new stuff. But, in terms of thinking about the volume of media available I think the non-expiring idea is valid. YouTube alone has 500 hours of video uploaded every 1 minute.
It’s lways worth considering the impact of AI through two lenses.
Is it a magic external power amplifier controlled by a handful of powerful companies? Like giant social networks for example, where the most successful network wins due to literal network effects coupled with the ability (capital, income) to pay for the technology and staff to run it. Or Big Oil who needs capital to exploit an oil field and ongoing money to pay their expert staff to work for them. Or Big Pharma, or Big Ag.
The alternate lens is that AI is like a dictionary or medicine reference or some other keystone textbook. Very expensive and time consuming to compile, but after that it requires little to no cost to duplicate and every copy helps a new person be better.
Unfortunately for the trillion dollar “labs”, I can’t see how AI is going to be the next Standard Oil, Meta, Pfizer, or John Deere. Unless the labs can somehow capture the market, destroy or outlaw the competition, or in some way cripple the general public’s ability to run their own models, then they are doomed to failure.
In the long run, Standard Oil will lose out to me hanging a solar panel off my balcony. Facebook is losing out to self organised networks using commodity chat apps (ahem, owned by whom? -all). The Labs will lose out to ollama.cpp running on my own hardware.
Now, one thing The Labs could do of course to defend against me running my own stuff, is to buy up all the VRAM so there’s none left for me! It’s as if my local inference was powered by milkshake, and they drank my milkshake, they drank it up!
The article missed the massive increase in work for creatives that's happened over the last 10 years. Being a influencer. 3.2M people earned more than $100,000 last year being a influencer, the combined earnings are between probably $25-50B in the US.
You really need to factor them in and their earnings in any discussion like this. It's still smaller than consumer spending on this stuff was before but it's the growing part.
Don't we primarily rely on trickle down economics.
What percentage of the earnings of influencers flows back into the economy as part of production costs instead of small percentage as spending or sitting as wealth in banks.
911 an the internet killed high culture. The first big inflection is 2001 and continues on a glide slope, with a drop for covid and then AI, but it was already looking dire.
Media, arts, film, and America: things that are not monolithic and cannot be evaluated with blanket statements.
A side-effect of the democratization of content creation and the explosion of ways to consume content is that there’s more low-quality things to consume. Low-quality content will always be produced in greater abundance than high-quality so there’s more garbage to dig through, but there are still gems out there.
Personally, after years of infrequent movie attendance, this is the first month that I can remember in my adult life that my wife and I saw two movies in the theater and given the opportunity there’s a third we’d still like to see!
There is some resurgence in quality here and there but then there is Avengers, MCU, Star Wars and idk how you can balance that with any amount of quality indie products
This might be (unintentionally?) part of the reason for the original subject: how many jobs does the Avengers IP pipeline support? How about for a single artifact output by it--one TV show, for example?
And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?
Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)
The last Avengers movie was 7.5 years ago. The last Star Wars episode was 7 years ago. (The Mandalorian one is the only standalone one since then.) Avengers are included in the MCU btw. There have only been about 1 to 3 MCU movies per year for the last few years. (2022: 3; 2023: 3; 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 2). There are tons of other, really good movies to watch. Not just indies either: Did you happen to see Project Hail Mary this year? The Odyssey? I missed Spider-man: Brand New Day (the MCU movie that came out this year so far), but it has 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I don't think that drags down the average in terms of quality either.
Apparently you need a 10 K+ karma account to say the following (which another account, a new one and not mine btw, posted). Some I'm just reusing the other dude's words:
In contrast, thought-terminating clichés like "facebook boomer" show critical thinking on your part.
I fully agree with that: calling someone a "facebook boomer" is just plain pathetic.
(btw the boomers are my parents' generation: don't go thinking I take it personally. I'm a GenX'er and GenX'er are badass, which is why I don't give a flying fuck saying what I think).
Something something about the pot and calling some kettle black etc.
Some of these graphs don't support the hypothesis. The movie one for example shows that employment is just slightly below what it was just after the financial crisis of 2008, and shows record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
Why should we expect the economy of 2026 (not 2020) be comparable to 2008? Am I missing something? Economy was awful i 2008 and we are currently in boom time markets, so boomy for so long that people have been saying it must be a bubble for years now.
> record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
The 2023 Hollywood Strike strike, the COVID lockdowns shutting down theaters, and the aggressive film production (UK, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Colombia) and VFX (Ireland, India, Colombia) subsidizes right as American states like California, Georgia, NY, and others began cutting them meant much of the American film and television industry got obliterated earlier this decade.
The reality is revenue is roughly consistent, but production costs one you remove subsidies (like what most of the US and Canada did) become exhorbitant in low margin industries like entertainment.
It's now cheaper to produce an "American" movie or TV show in Ireland, using British actors affecting an American accent (thank Hugh Laurie, Idris Elba, and Dominic West for that), with post and VFX done in India than it is in the US.
This is something that has been reported on in the space for a decade now, but not much can be done.
This article is also another example of why HNers should stick to their own lane, as most lack context or visibility into other industries.
That's part of the point. If anyone can create cheap garbage, flood it on socials, and get people to click see what goes viral the old attention economy is just totally disrupted
Jobs might be down but the amount of money going to produce media, film, and "the arts" has never been higher. A lot of it is centralized but possibly these jobs have just shifted around to other roles and specialities.
The amount of video being produced has never been higher, as well.
Rise of influencers and content creators - less hollywood gatekeeping and more commoditizing the distribution of content across YT, Tiktok, instagram. Big names moving out of networks and into distribution channels they have more control over - making more content, more money, and with less resources.
> The streaming era has proven an extremely difficult transition, with traditional films and TV shows losing watch time to user-generated and increasingly AI-assisted or AI-generated content flows.
Isn’t this the wrong conclusion.
It’s that streaming as the monetization vehicle no longer creates an opportunity for movie maker to make huge returns.
Once, a blockbuster movie could make $1 billions.
Today, the movie maker only gets a sliver of the $12/mo subscription fee.
I think you’re both talking about the same issue though. They’re saying traditional film and tv is in competition with free media, UGC and whatnot. You said the same thing but using numbers.
The consumer behavior, or opportunity as you put it, that supported those billion dollar blockbusters has changed largely due to competing media. Film and TV are not the only show in town anymore.
Mergers are also a huge factor, and the recent Warner/Paramount merger is going to cost a lot of jobs (even more so because the merged company will be so deeply in debt that it will have to aggressively cut expenses).
you have to be very careful quoting those sources that are based on incorrect data. One might have three jobs and make 5 times less than it used to be. It's a rabbit hole that needs its own thorough research.
The only thing I’ve been watching lately are Soviet films on youtube. Mosfilms and Gorky films have their full catalogs on there. Sergei Bondarchuk’s films are deeply moving. Seventeen Moments from Spring is incredible as well- the Soviet answer to James Bond. For some reason it feels deeply refreshing to watch these films instead of what the US has been producing.
My media diet has dropped steadily for 15 years now. I don’t know how much of it is just aging, and how much truly is tired/fatigue for the products offered. And the burden/complexity of streaming has basically just led me to throw my hands in the air and find other things to do. I already spend too much time tapping on my phone, much less watch yet another screen.
I’d just guess it’s close to none of the layoffs are AI. rather, in a world of anyone can broadcast to the world on YouTube the number of creators that can reach an audience has grown 10000x. The glut of content means far far less market to support the old media
How does one consider, depression, inflation, interest rates and investments, purchasing power, and other impactful economic downturns for such analysis? During this window a consequential war in Europe, another one in Iran leading to an energy crisis, has happened as well which could accelerate the existing trends in one way or the other. I think any serious comparison should control for these factors.
Honestly I think it's because everything sucks these days. I know there is a lot of survivorship bias going on but _something_ has changed. I have recently been on a 1980-2010's movie binge. It seemed like movies before were raw and real. Now everything feels like it's plastic and made in a lab, dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
Don't even get me started on shows. There are a ton of great ones but now they have 2-4, sometimes even 5 year gaps! The "increased" quality doesn't warrant it! I know people say "well now they're movie-grade" but I really could not care less. I don't need every episode of every show to be blockbuster quality. Just make it not suck! I would love to go to the movies and buy all the subscription services but it's simply not worth it! /rant
Very little. It's that America's tax incentives are not competitive. They fly crews to make game shows from LA to london because its cheaper to shoot a show there. There's strong momentum to change that at the moment, there's a bill that might actually get passed that will make the tax environment competitive again in the states that stack theirs on it.
Most of the jobloss seems to be due to the movie industry. The movie industry has been a flop machine over the last decade out side a handful of successes. That probably has more to do with jobloss than anything ai related.
Not even short form. I found myself watching an hour and a half long YT video of a dude jet skiing from WA state to Alaska and can’t even hype myself up to watch a feature film.
Seems things are starting to reverse and movies are picking back up again in various statistics. People want to see the movie everyone is talking about online and all over social media. Plus they make money directly through ticket sales not from the dubious assumptions behind social media ad conversions.
It's purely anecdotal, but the word I've heard from the industry is that the number of sfx and animation jobs had stayed the same, but the bids are coming in much much lower. The example was $500k jobs were now coming in around $50k.
Over on the entertainment side, video is getting really good. Yes, there's a huge amount of AI slop, but the good stuff is quite good.
- Kono Express. [1] Disney laid off an character animator from the Star Wars factory. The animator decided to see what was possible with the best modern tools. He's using both AI tools and Unreal Engine. There are six episodes now, and each one is a bit better than the last, as he gets a handle on the technology. The first episode looks like generic sci-fi stuff, at good quality but not yet perfect. By episode three, he has this nailed. It keeps getting better. Episode six [2] is a delight. He's now almost up to current Hollywood quality. One person, turning out half an hour of content every few weeks. Who needs Disney any more?
- Asian vertical dramas. 17,000 episodes per day. Apparently 55% of China's AI capacity is cranking these out. Search for "asian drama creation tools". Amusingly, Google and Bing have completely different tool lists. These are all software as a service products, with accounts and token charges. Currently, visuals are quite good, with some notable errors. Complex patterns on clothing don't stay consistent, for example. Continuity errors remain common.
Automatically generated audio is currently terrible, at least in the English translations.
Plots are so cliche that it's clear people are re-using the same prompts. "Heiress girl returns from countryside" is very popular. Here's a recent drama, about startup working hours.[3] The plot is silly but the visuals are OK.
- There's starting to be a thing for turning out movies based on old SF novels. So far, these seem unauthorized by the original author, but that will change. In time, every good book will have its movie.
The good stuff in this space is getting to be better than the Marvel Overexpanded Universe.
Scruples likely has something to do with it, but not in the way you suggest. My feed is full of dancing and singing. Seeing a dance trend go viral and with 48 hours people all over the world are posting their rendition of it is remarkable.
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.
This is my thinking. TikTok is very entertaining. I can’t do hours, but 30 minutes to an hour is great. Compare it to an unswipable hours long sporting event, 30 minutes looking for the right movie you quit 30 minutes in or have to pause till another day because something comes up, or tv shows with unresolved endings that leave you feeling like you are in a toxic relationship-hating the commitment but afraid of the sense of loss.
Habitual use of shorter and shorter form content trains you to expect gratification faster and faster. There is most certainly a better reward for delaying gratification. A really good movie can leave you on a complete high or completely devastated. I'm pretty certain tiktok cannot. It's cheap quick entertainment but if you get used to that fast shallow enjoyment you can't hold on long enough for the good stuff.
Something I realized recently was that when I watch videos in any form (feature film, documentary, dramatic or comedy series, or short) I have this nagging feeling I'm wasting time. I think it's because watching is such a passive activity.
When I read, I don't get that feeling. Even here on HN where it is mostly wasting time.
I think this is why so much media has viewer comments. It's something to engage with and lose awareness of the passing time.
> Media firms are decidedly coy about their AI use, both to protect against public backlash and, more financially important, to preserve the legal basis for their copyrights
Lying preserves the legal basis for copyright?
Maybe what that means is this: it's not illegal to lie about something being copyrighted (to discourage copying) if you don't actually take it as far as taking someone to court over it.
The outsource comment was interesting. Gaming didn't come up in this article but seems similarly hit. I was recently surprised to see how much game dev work is done outside the US for American companies.
Also thought the graphs around covid were interesting, there wasn't a spike up or anything it's just been consistently down.
The article said we're not in a recession. I thought we were lol
> In other words, the primary impacts of AI art will be on culture and society rather than the macroeconomy.
In that case we're in deep shit. It's already worrisome to see the effects that various technological "advances" (like smartphones) have had on culture and society. This is likely to make things even worse.
the article is interestingly made think more about the recent timeline since covid, sequential money printing bonanza followed by historical sacking of VC and all kind of money current AI bubble accelerated with faster job transfer to low income locations like India and overall “productivity gains” by the least competent corporate plankton with huge expertise devaluation
I wish the article had split TV and movies because there are different factors at play.
Movies just don't make economic sense unless they're blockbusters and that's mainly because of the decline in movie theaters for various reasons but also the death of physical media sales. DVD sales in the 1990s were a bit of a Golden Age. Matt Damon talked about this [1].
Up until the 2000s the TV economic model was:
1. Produce a full season of TV, typically ~22 episodes, and air those on network TV. Sell ads;
2. Sell physical media. Unlike movies, this wasn't as big of a factor until serialized TV came about but it was a factor; and
3. Syndication. Basic cable channels and foreign distributors would pay to air TV shows.
Premium cable (eg HBO) was an exception. It still had foreign distribution but cable subscriptions replaced ad revenue.
In all of these cases, actors, writers, etc would get residuals or back end participation. For what became TV shows, there was a whole ecosystem of pilots. Scripts would be bought. Some would get greenlit for pilots. Some of those would get a half or full season order.
A TV season meant basically a full year of work for those involved. All the pilot activity meant more work. Residuals allowed actors and writers to survive between jobs. There are still people getting significant residuals from Friends from over 30 years ago.
All of that died with streaming. Netflix streaming first began as a means of monetizing old seasons of TV and older movies. It was additional revenue. But as Netflix grew, all the studios saw dollar signs and launched "me too" streaming services, most of which were doomed from the start. Streamers began to cannibalize the syndication and physical media revenue.
Netflix in particular made the decision relatively early that they needed original content to survive. By having a worldwide customer base, they didn't care about physical media and didn't have to pay for syndication. Also because of some unfortunate contracts in the late 2000s, there was little to no residuals for streaming so that too was more saved money.
And the cost-cutting continued. Smaller seasons (8-13 episodes) with smaller writing rooms meant fewer people employed, particularly when it might be 2-3 years between seasons. Suddenly you needed 2 jobs a year to survive where once it was 1. That's a huge difference because you're lucky to get 1 job. And you got no residuals on top of that.
This coincided with more general Hollywood cost-cutting to move productions out of LA to Canada (particularly Toronto but also Vancouver), Atlanta and elsewhere.
Hollywood was an ecosystem. Short term profit-seeking has basically destroyed it but also, so has the high cost of housing. LA used to be somewhere you could live cheaply and this enabled people to chase their dream. Many didn't make it but this was the entry to the funnel. Some did.
Now there are fewer jobs and those are increasingly dominated by second and third generation nepo babies.
Why do you think there's so much recycled IP now? Relaunches of 1990s and 2000s properties. The people involved are out of work. That's why. And it's easier to greenlight something with a track record. Also, notice how many podcasts there are of people who used to be in shows? The Office is particularly egregious for this. I swear half the cast have podcasts now. Why? Because they're out of work too.
I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood. Expensive housing is an input into everything you produce and do. Yet people see it as their retirement. What retirement? If your $200k house is now $1M, so is every other house. You still only own one housing unit's worth of wealth. So you need to multiple houses, to be a landlord or Airbnb host. And we wonder why the housing supply sucks.
> This coincided with more general Hollywood cost-cutting to move productions out of LA to Canada (particularly Toronto but also Vancouver), Atlanta and elsewhere.
> I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood.
I hardly know anything about the tv/movie industry, but this is a bit of funny juxtaposition when Toronto and Vancouver also have famously unaffordable housing.
yeah, worthless analysis of side effects without taking into account any causation variable to anchor anything to anything.
Art is gatekept by distribution. You only pay artist because otherwise they will go independent or use the other studio/record-label/etc. It's the only reason artists got paid handsomely in the past.
Today, money only come from spotify, netflix, and soon one or two movie studios. News and Newspaper is already gone, it's past the point of monopoly and into billionaire personal toy.
This also answers why live performance is the only thing going up. It is the only thing that still require any choice from the artist. Everything else is give-me-or-media-or-else.
I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts.
For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too.
This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry.
It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.
In general I fully agree except with your conclusion. In the short-run efficiency immediately benefits the established players, but in the long-run it benefits, more or less literally, everybody except them. Because as you bring the price down on things you enable more efficient competition. Competition increases, margins decrease, baseline minimal standard of quality for success increases.
Software is a very clear example on this front. Valheim [1] is a game that was made mostly by one guy, at first at least. Not that long ago, this would have been a multi million dollar game produced by a wide array of people. It's just that tools, markets, and more have made it possible for even single developers to have an absurd degree of efficiency. And LLMs are probably going to bump this up exponentially.
This is why a metaphor I'm currently drawn to is one of people living in a very agrarian society just prior to the Industrial Revolution. What would they have envisioned being created? Super farms of course. And those super farms were indeed created, but the overall impact was such that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. The future we're moving into isn't going to be the same but more efficient for those on top. That efficiency is going to revolutionize the economy in ways that are probably impossible to see from a distant, much how somebody living in an agrarian society couldn't have even begun to imagine the 'real' impact of the Industrial Revolution.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/
> when you start moving things away from LA to "save money"
Economic hubs work when there is more efficiency to be found in industrially-codependent resources being located close to each other, than there is in cheaper labor costs outside the hub. Hollywood's heyday was when there was enormous value to putting actors, agents, producers, cameras, sets, editors, VFX, writers all within close driving distance of each other, so that you could organize new movies and shows at the drop of a hat. In a day and age when teenagers are able to use cellphone cameras and pocketmoney to produce stories that are compelling enough to command attention and advertising dollars, the value of that geographic proximity has declined tremendously.
AI didn't build the coffin, but it's been putting nails in it.
Another huge nail was the strikes - business will continue with or without those on the picket line, but it just moved to where there weren't strikes.
There are also tax considerations, even movies get shot away from Hollywood.
>Regular people do not have more more money or time
Of course they do. Median real weekly wages[1] have been rising for decades all while the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen[2].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/les1252881600Q
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/avhwpeusa065nrug
Meanwhile household basics increased faster than wages. In other words people don’t have more money.
https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
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I don't find either of these charts dispositive by themselves. The cost of healthcare, education, housing, transportation, and insurance have easily outpaced any growth in wages. Another facet of this debate is that cheaper goods aren't necessarily of equal or better quality.
> Of course they do.
That level of certainty is not justified.
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> the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen
Hooray for just-in-time scheduling where workers have to be available full time but rarely get scheduled full time. It’s an innovation that has been great for capital and terrible for labor.
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The CPI has gone up far faster than real wages.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
People are earning about 12% more and working about 5% less since 1980, but everything costs roughly 3x what it did in 1980 relative to wages, and that's where most people are pinched.
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Upvote for bringing data, since I did not. That said, that quote was in reference to AI, so referred to the past 3-4 years. And of course, our money today is not worth as much as it was 20+ years ago. Also many important goods and services increased in price at a higher rate than inflation or wage increases. It might be interesting to look at such industries for a history of consolidation or PE-involvement.
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Nicely sliced. Weekly wages for full time workers have been rising for decades while fewer workers work full time. I don't think this data backs your assertion.
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25% increase in half a century? We ahd like 3 technological revolutions since then and economy grew massively.
Compare that to how much wealth appreciated, like a price of gold or real estate.
Median real wages increased by the narrowest possible meaning of this word.
Trickle down economy is literally a trickle.
Boomers gonna boom
Why? AI is taking jobs. getty images just filed bankruptcy, stackoverflow went from heavy use to almost no use. AI is taking jobs, tipping toeing around it isn't the best thing. It needs to be said, and then what next needs to be figured out because first we talk about 200k jobs, then we will next talk about 2 million and then 20million
Or not. Significant shifts in the nature of emplyoment are undoubtably disruptive, but there's no particular reason to believe this one will result in mass unemployment any more than previous shifts have done so.
Especially if we're talking about jobs in creative industries that require customers with the means to support and consume their output.
Besides, an overabundance of surplus labor, if properly managed, is as likely to lead to a better world than a worse one. There's no ironclad rule that everyone, or even the majority, need to work to live or live to work to be happy. And many creatives, in particular, would be happy and productive working on personal and noncommercial projects if funding were no longer an issue.
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> AI is taking jobs, tipping toeing around it isn't the best thing. It needs to be said, and then what next needs to be figured out
If we think about it, AI can be seen as dumping cheap products below cost and disrupting the domestic market.
I mean the real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright laws in many cases and even if we discount that, it is well known that AI is being pushed far below the actual costs for providers. There are disruptive technologies, yes but this is not the same if the real cost is hidden or deferred and it doesn't compare with horses/cars or whatever analogy that comes up often.
In the physical world, this is called dumping isn't it? Just because tech is involved it doesn't change the fact. Countries already have anti dumping laws.
I live in Atlanta ("y'allywood"), a formerly big LA film outsourcing location. They shot much of Marvel and Netflix stuff here pre-2023. The unit below me has been rented to Winona Ryder and Dave Bautista.
Beyond that, my hobby is film and I know tons of people in the industry. I've made indie films with them.
All the jobs have gone to Europe. It's simply cheaper to film there now. Amazon and Netflix built infrastructure and taught local crews how during the pandemic content wars.
Looking at my Gen Z wife, all the eyeballs have gone to TikTok.
There's the answer.
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Economists keep saying over and over that so far AI has had minimal impact on the economy. That may change in time, but we aren’t seeing massive losses as a result of AI, despite some C suites using that as an excuse to lay off after over hiring.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-re...
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Maybe a lot of people worked at stackoverflow idk; but I have been organising electronic “underground” music nights for 15+ years and basically stopped now because there just wasn’t a big enough audience anymore.
Anyway what I’m trying to say is that I think COVID and its aftermath is a much bigger factor here than AI, especially when it comes to “live / performing” art
To use your example of the movie industry, everyone gets the benefits of the effiency gains.
There's twice as many scripted shows today and twice as many movies released despite the average person spending half the time they did 30 years ago watching TV and movies. For less than the price of a 1990s cable tv subscription we can access almost any movie, instantly streamed to our HDR TVs at home, on demand. The digital VFX we expect of a low tier direct to streaming show are better than the some of the best 90s movies (practical effects excluded).
There are hundreds of thousands of people across the world using the 4k camera in their pocket they bought for a few hundred dollars to make hyper specific media and distributing it free on YouTube. They are editing it in cheap or free video editors on their computer or built in to their phone.
It's easy to shit on modern media. With democratization comes slop. There's garbage now just like there was before. But we are absolutely benefitting off the efficency gains of the last few decades.
Modern technology makes distribution free, so then you need to compete on brand and quality.
Outsourcing seems extremely short-sighted in this environment. You're devaluing your brand, and giving expertise and training to another place that can make their own products.
I also wonder how much can be attributed to weakened intellectual property protection. Comments in this thread say they don't pay for anything because they can watch it all for free.
Offshoring of manufacturing to China is the analogy that springs to mind for me.
Rhythm and Hues (Oscar award winner for “Life of Pi”) was killed because it was cheaper to move that work offshore.
Sure, we can blame AI for a lot of crimes, but let’s start with the people who offshore everything first. Then when those offshore people get fired because of AI, you don’t feel so bad because it’s not like you’re firing anyone or killing any companies in the same country, right?
At the end of the day, what is the functional difference between offshoring and AI? People in this country still get fired and can’t find work, because the work is no longer done in this country. And then later, much of this work is no longer done by humans in any country.
Profits über alles.
> I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI.
...because nothing in it supported the thesis?
Print and audio/video have been showing clear declines since the 90s, thanks to the death of print, CDs and cable. Maybe AI is part of this, maybe not, but if it is, we're talking about a slight change in slope. These industries were walking dead before CNNs were a thing.
The one industry where you'd expect to see the clearest impact (coding) is basically flat.
FWIW, there was a very good recent NY Times opinion piece titled "I Teach at a Business School. It's Time to Shut Them Down." by a professor at the University of Cambridge business school who argues that these schools have solely promulgated this idea of "efficiency" as their primary output to the detriment of society at large. Worth a read if you're interested in the topic.
Consider "The Red Queen" by Ridley book. It's premise is that evolution constantly improves a species, but since other species also are improving, the species runs and runs but stays in the same place.
It's the same thing in business. One has to relentlessly decrease the cost of doing business, because your competitors are doing it as well. You run and run and stay in the same place.
I haven't read the cited article, but the professor would need to show that industry profit margins are increasing to make his point. I haven't seen any evidence that margins increased in general.
Efficiency could mean creating more with the same labour, not creating the same amount with less labour.
Yes, it definitely can. That's sort of why I kept putting it in scarequotes. I am not skeptic of AI, fwiw. Mostly just our current crop of corpo/gov leadership and their views on what healthy economy looks like.
look all the commenters here... this is a lot of words with way too much intellectualizing.
tv and movies killed radio and opera. and now tiktok is killing tv and movies. it's not complicated.
You raise a good point, but I would like to add more nuance. Traditional TV is largely displaced by YouTube (small content creators) and streaming (Netflix, etc.) Traditional film has moved nearly entirely to streaming, but there is more of it now than ever before. TikTok is something truly generational to me. Just like Instagram largely killed the blog because it allowed normies to watch the amazing lives of the top 5%. TikTok allows young people (mostly women) to gossip faster than ever before.
The legacy media industry had a huge amount of fat and inefficiency, lots of people sitting around pretending to work. Joe Rogan produces a top podcast that pulls a larger audience than the vast majority of TV shows, and does everything with about 5 employees. Regardless of what you think of him personally or the podcast content, that is amazing efficiency. And he started it before LLMs were even a thing.
While I suspect you're not wrong about either inefficiency in large, well-funded media organziations or the efficiency of Rogan's operation, comparing his podcast to anything but a substantially similar TV show is hardly a fair comparison. Even a relatively low-budget scripted TV series is going to require a cast, writers, props, sets, costumes, hair and makeup, lighting, camera work, craft services, transportation, significantly more editing and postproduction, the list goes on, plus directors and producers and administrative personnel to manage all of this.
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That's not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison. The inputs for an unscripted podcast are vastly different from a scripted TV show. They're different mediums for expression, and each carries different costs.
I can’t speak to everyone, but grok bot is helping me gain so much efficiency in managing all of the things that I have going on in my life that I feel much more present now.
Before I’d always feel distracted by things weighing on me that I needed to get done. Now a huge load of those things are asked of grok bot quickly, then I close the laptop and go spend time where I should be.
It feels like it’s lifting a huge burden from my daily life.
The article is well-written and well-informed, but it's hard to really see the impact of AI just by looking at the data. Even the author attributes most of the job losses to factors other than AI, and even when AI use in the industry is clearly discussed, it's hard to draw any clear connection to job losses.
Maybe we haven't had enough time to see the full impact, but right now, most job losses seem to be attributable to shifting consumption habits and a supply of content (both professional and amateur) that vastly outweighs demand.
Before AI showed up the UN released a report on the Attention Economy. It said Supply of content had vastly outstripped Demand. It decoupled because entertainment/media was being used to push other products. The telcos, amazon, google/fb and many others were all subsidizing content to push some other product. Exploding info chasing finite non growing eyeballs and time.
Creative content will become more personal and less profitable, art being some sort of commercial enterprise is a relative new phenomenon, we will survive without it. Most artists will have to generate income by performance or physical creation, just like it has been for the whole time before it was commoditized to feed the "attention economy"
What a gross and completly apt terminology for the commoditization of art from the bureaucrats by the way.
I'm looking at gaming these days and there's such an endless selection of excellent games I'd love to play. But there are far more great games than I have time to play. So when I see stuff like using AI to make games faster, I can only think what is the point, The market won't buy or play more games so something else has to give.
I feel completely the opposite. Mind, I play games a fair bit, but I generally don't feel that excited about most, and I'd say a lot of them have very repetitive tropes. I'm generally in the market for 30h+ spent on a game, so that filters out a lot of the more trendy stuff.
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Online games though you pretty much have to follow the herds to the newest titles. You could stick around but it usually isn't pretty: tough to find full lobbies or full of sweats or both.
I started building a game on a custom engine a few years ago and I used to think about selling it, but nowadays the market is so oversaturated I tend to think of it as nothing more than a coding exercise.
"there's such an endless selection of excellent games"
If you have 0 standards.
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Same thing here. I gave up on gaming all together because my library grew too much. As a kid, I didn’t even own a console, I had to borrow gameboy or go to my friend house and even then it was just an handful of cartridges. Even now, I plan to just focus on small sample of programming languages and ecosystems, and learn them inside out. There’s just too much stuff out there.
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Could you give any hint about the title/authors/year of this report that would allow me to find it?
Haha, look at the old B+W Perry Mason TV episodes. He drives all kinds of different cars. Those cars were definitely product placements.
It's also very easy to make high quality content. You can record a professional album with 5000$ in gear. Live instruments and all.
You can make your album accessible to every human on earth for free.
So my Instagram is full of very very high quality music, much of it I'll only listen to once.
Music from all over the world.
Its great.
Yet sad. So much music I'll never get to. I have to spend 40 to 50 hours a week generating income. If only I did better on that Meta interview way back.
I'd be retired now, free to indulge in endless entertainment.
I guess preferences vary, but the idea of spending my retirement consuming "content" seems like a type of hell.
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There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
> When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.
Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.
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> There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
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> We are still in a desert.
It isn't exactly a desert? It is more like a full buffet, but nothing but cheap, mass-produced sugar literally everywhere. All the 2-star donuts and chocolate cupcakes you can eat, and nothing but that.
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I would look to the culture industry in Japan as an alternative to the gatekeeping-industrial complex we call Hollywood.
Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.
Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.
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> Most movies suck
Most new ones do, but they've been making like a dozen great ones each year for for like 80 years.
Honestly TV (including the back catalogs) are where most of the truly good video content is.
> cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content
This part I really agree with. It's the reason shitty Netflix reality shows are among the most popular 'watercooler discussion' shows today.
The real job losses are probably in commercial art. If you're making an illustration for an ad, that's almost certainly automated now. Looking at when the decline started, it's about when Stable Diffusion got going.
Some of this stuff is pre-AI, Photoshop smart tools stuff. Especially clothing ads. Nobody has a live model pose with each item color any more. Or even each item. (I used to know actress/model/waitress types in LA who did that. Grind job: "OK, the blue sweater is next, and hurry it up, we have 50 to do before lunch". But it paid OK.)
No one has any money and entertainment is the first thing you cut.
Every streaming service feels more and more user hostile. If I want to watch South Park it’s a 15$ a month subscription just for that .
Paramount Plus has nothing else.
I want to watch Lanterns, another 30$ a month.
Maybe King of The Hill , 20$ a month. The Reboot has this weird lazy animation style.
I just don't pay for it. If there's something I really wanna watch I might buy one month of the service binge it then cancel.
The streaming model has imho mostly killed old style television formats with the new way of hyping up a show in the first couple episodes by tossing money and talent, then leave people to hang with unsatisfying conclusions once you've got that sub money. It's all about convincing people to sign up and stay signed up with promises for new content. The quality of the content doesn't matter as long as there's a lot of it and it's enough to keep people from unsubscribing.
With traditional TV your value was directly determined by how many people were watching so you could sell addspace. And despite there being less choice and harder for independent players to get time, in some ways it was weirdly more democratic because if a show sucked or an episode sucked people would just change the channel or watch something else. With streaming they still do that but it's all in the same price scheme so doesn't hurt their bottom line. They're incentivised to just crank out as much crap as possible to keep subs up. Won't last.
In the US, there are a lot more rich people than there used to be [1] and they're often driving prices up because they can afford to pay. (Most obviously in real estate.)
[1] https://pages.skybrian.com/2026/us-households-by-income-band...
and the content strangely sucks most of the time. like no one can write, edit, direct, or act anymore. Not always but strangely often.
If it sucks the conclusion is to turn it off for me. Stopped most subscriptions.
Every thing is safe.
If certain ultra conservative countries don’t like LGBT representation they don’t get to be in your major movie.
At this point I don’t know the difference between Chat GPT writing the next marvel movie or Disney hiring someone. Either way the story needs to be crystal clear. You never watch something that makes you think.
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I feel like this comment contrasted with the incredible movie releases this since ~May is just not holding water.
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Well it's shot on a phone, lit with bad LED lighting and edited on a laptop. It all shows in the final product.
It feels like all media, from tv shows to movies are all following a certain formula, with a goal to drive a certain social perspective about people and society.
I believe its called South America now.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I stopped watching broadcast/cable TV 20 years ago. I had Netflix until they switched to their own content and started raising rates, so I dropped it. I now rent DVDs from a place about 15 minutes from me. I also have Kanopy for free. Here’s the opinion: stop watching. That’s the only way to send a message. Read a book. Rent a dvd. Or play a game. Or draw. Or visit friends and play board games. Or learn to play an instrument. Or find a game store near you and go to game nights. Or bowl. Find something else to do than drool at a screen watching content product that doesn’t give a shit about. Right now I’m doing advent of code from 2019 in LISP. Haven’t programmed lisp since college and I’m having a blast. Get a hobby. Screw the media machine.
> Paramount Plus has nothing else.
This is funny, because every damn time I find something I want to watch its on paramount+.
There has to be a paradox/law named after this at this point. "The thing you're trying to watch will always be on the service you don't have."
That is a real reason I can't summon the interest to subscribe to any of them: Whatever I pick, I'll be dissatisfied, so I put it off for another day...
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For South Park, I just wait for a full season to be out and watch it over a month, then cancel. $15 for a season isn't too bad.
If only there was a service where you paid a fixed price for a bundle and you had a set top box that had all these channels together in one package. Of course you'd have a lot of channels you never looked at but overall it would be more efficient.
Without even looking at the data, I bet both of your hypotheses here are wrong.
I bet the median American has more real disposable income than four years ago.
I bet the median American spends more in real terms on entertainment (and streaming specifically) than four years ago.
Almost without fail, the data in almost any area of modern life seems to be way less negative than people’s vibes about it are.
I think we are still in a hangover from the financial cocaine the governments were handing out during the pandemic (and even long after it was a problem).
Also, nobody has any time for entertainment. Office workers all working 80 hours a week fearing stack ranking, PIPs, layoffs, needing to scramble to get a new H1B job or risk getting kicked out of the country and having to uproot kids. Service workers are working 120 hours a week across 3 jobs. Single people are working 100+ hours a week studying and interviewing and not getting jobs.
While this may be true for some people, overall this is not backed up by the data.
The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.
https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables.htm
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Interesting, I have seen people be stretched thin and more stretched but I haven't seen people working 80-120 hour weeks. Different circles maybe?
I do feel for anyone trying to find a new H1B sponsor. I've lived and worker as a foreigner before, its stressful for sure. It is also a tough spot for a country to be in, if your domestic labor is struggling to find or keep jobs itsnhard to justify continuing protections for foreign labor.
Not true. If you look at any “cheap entertainment” dashboard, you’ll see usage has been going up.
My hypothesis is, YT, Reels and TT are eating everyone’s lunch, as people spend more time on those. And for people who don’t watch much, there’s Spotify. Basically attention span degradation across all age groups.
"You're going to begin to see demand destruction based on the pricing environment." - Bob Jordan, CEO of Southwest Airlines, April 23rd
The full quote implies more uncertainty
> So based on that, we believe what is most fair is to put current trends in because you cannot predict at what point consumers and demand is going to be -- you're going to begin to see demand destruction based on the pricing environment.
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/04/23/so...
"We've finally gone too far on pricing" is a wild thing to hear a CEO say out loud in 2026.
It's not that the prices are up to milk the consumer. Look at Southwest's thin profit margin. Costs are up
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The framing of job "loses" is irrationally pessimistic.
When a job is no longer required, it means we (humanity) managed to do something clever to get it done with less labour - a great achievement!
This frees up those involved in that job to pursue other work, increases supply, and drives down prices - i.e. society overall experiences an increase in standards of living.
The only negatives are on the individual who's laid off through 1. frictional unemployment (the hardship someone goes through when switching jobs), and 2. potential salary reduction as they go from a lucrative job to being a newbie in their new career. But like any career, they can build that up again.
The best mindset is not to take any job/salary for granted in the first place, as it's not someone else's responsibility to employ us.
Way too simplistic view.
> increase supply
Not necessarily. Supply could stay the same.
> drives down prices
Not necessarily, if raw materials got more expensive.
> The only negatives are on the individual
You might want to have a look at youth unemployment rates. Sometimes, there simply are no jobs: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/unemployment-rate-for-you...
Changing careers reduces your income and your purchasing power. If it happens to too many people at once, standard of living decreases.
You simply neglect demand in your entire argument.
But layoffs only occur if firms can produce output at a lower cost by using AI rather than humans. Those humans go and work elsewhere and total output increases.
Try LLMing this (it efficiently interrogates both your assumptions in a single prompt):
> in standard economic thinking, is it possible for a job to be made redundant due to improvements in technology and that employee to be reassigned elsewhere, and for either long run supply to go down or long run prices to go up?
Note: there will always be edge cases, for example if I owned a business, I could theoretically replace someone with AI, and increase my prices, which would contradict the idea that greater efficiency always results in more supply and lower prices, but overall in the long-run that won't happen.
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I do think certain tax incentives to create jobs, contractual obligations between employer and employee and legal restrictions on termination of employment can create a condition where someone is responsible for employing you.
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I was wondering about this recently. I visited my parents in Italy and got to watch some TV with them (at home we don't have the TV even connected to the Antenna as it is only for YT or through the media center).
I noticed that a good percentage (between 30 and 50%) is AI generated and I was wondering what impact it had on the actors/musicians/... . I mean, with a few 10s of Euros now you can achieve something that before it would've costed you several thousands or tens of thousands (depends on the quality of the production I guess).
I assumed at the time it must've been a slaughter for that part of the gig economy and this seems to confirm it.
Interest rates and inflation have vastly more impact than AI.
This 100%. All the layoffs started before AI. High interest rates means businesses can't afford to take risks. Our entire economy is based on easy money from cheap debt. The tech layoffs are about being able to pay for AI whether that's paying for data centers or tokens.
I expect AI use to cause an increase in output, not a decrease in employment. At least right now. In TV and Film it would translate to more content that was too expensive to film before. If your business is making movies and then suddenly the market is flooded with fast and cheap movies, then you're going to make more fast and cheap movies too!
That doesn't explain anything in this article. All the time series go back to 1990 when interest rates were significantly higher any way you look at them.
Not factored in is the fact that there is just so much media now.
I think we could stop all content creation today and everyone would still have enough to last through their grandchildren's lifetimes.
And unlike a lot of things, media doesn't expire. I still regularly find albums, movies, and books from decades ago I enjoy today.
Media of all forms is just worth less now due to oversupply.
> And unlike a lot of things, media doesn't expire. I still regularly find albums, movies, and books from decades ago I enjoy today.
Media doesn't expire, but with increasing distance to the cultural context it was created in, enjoying any work in all its nuances becomes harder. Take for example Arrested Development - one of the funniest TV shows of this century, but unless you bring sufficient knowledge on the Bush Jr. administration, you'll miss the funniest layers of many jokes and stories.
And it gets all the more interesting to look back at how the Zeitgeist changed over time, as tropes evolve and tastes keep changing.
Maybe. As a contrast, look at the book industry. We have access to 500+ years of books digitally, and yet most people prefer to read books written in the last 50 years.
The point stands, the over supply is a huge factor. There’s so much content available that serves as a competitive/substitute for traditional film and tv that it changes the entire consumer behavior and economy around the industry, which translates to jobs.
I don’t think people will ever really want to only watch old stuff, or lack desire for new stuff. But, in terms of thinking about the volume of media available I think the non-expiring idea is valid. YouTube alone has 500 hours of video uploaded every 1 minute.
The last 50 years of books is still more books in the genre you like than you could read in a lifetime.
It’s lways worth considering the impact of AI through two lenses.
Is it a magic external power amplifier controlled by a handful of powerful companies? Like giant social networks for example, where the most successful network wins due to literal network effects coupled with the ability (capital, income) to pay for the technology and staff to run it. Or Big Oil who needs capital to exploit an oil field and ongoing money to pay their expert staff to work for them. Or Big Pharma, or Big Ag.
The alternate lens is that AI is like a dictionary or medicine reference or some other keystone textbook. Very expensive and time consuming to compile, but after that it requires little to no cost to duplicate and every copy helps a new person be better.
Unfortunately for the trillion dollar “labs”, I can’t see how AI is going to be the next Standard Oil, Meta, Pfizer, or John Deere. Unless the labs can somehow capture the market, destroy or outlaw the competition, or in some way cripple the general public’s ability to run their own models, then they are doomed to failure.
In the long run, Standard Oil will lose out to me hanging a solar panel off my balcony. Facebook is losing out to self organised networks using commodity chat apps (ahem, owned by whom? -all). The Labs will lose out to ollama.cpp running on my own hardware.
Now, one thing The Labs could do of course to defend against me running my own stuff, is to buy up all the VRAM so there’s none left for me! It’s as if my local inference was powered by milkshake, and they drank my milkshake, they drank it up!
The article missed the massive increase in work for creatives that's happened over the last 10 years. Being a influencer. 3.2M people earned more than $100,000 last year being a influencer, the combined earnings are between probably $25-50B in the US.
You really need to factor them in and their earnings in any discussion like this. It's still smaller than consumer spending on this stuff was before but it's the growing part.
How did you arrive at the 3.2 million people + 100K figure?
Don't we primarily rely on trickle down economics.
What percentage of the earnings of influencers flows back into the economy as part of production costs instead of small percentage as spending or sitting as wealth in banks.
911 an the internet killed high culture. The first big inflection is 2001 and continues on a glide slope, with a drop for covid and then AI, but it was already looking dire.
Have you seen media, arts and film that America produces recently? It's garbage.
Media, arts, film, and America: things that are not monolithic and cannot be evaluated with blanket statements.
A side-effect of the democratization of content creation and the explosion of ways to consume content is that there’s more low-quality things to consume. Low-quality content will always be produced in greater abundance than high-quality so there’s more garbage to dig through, but there are still gems out there.
Personally, after years of infrequent movie attendance, this is the first month that I can remember in my adult life that my wife and I saw two movies in the theater and given the opportunity there’s a third we’d still like to see!
Let’s go back to the good ol days when half of movies were about cowboys.
Go ahead and watch one of those cowboy movies like Once Upon a Time in the West. We've definitely lost some skills as a species over time.
I can't watch youtube due to all these garbage. Youtube should allow me to blanket ban on publisher who use full AI for full video.
Ironically I find that YouTube has the absolute best content. It's the only one with authentic people making quality stuff for exactly your niche.
That doesn't mean there isn't trash, and I suppose if tv series are your jam it's likely sub-par, but for me it's unmatched by light years.
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They can't, as far as organizational politics goes. Tech is all in on AI.
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I just stopped using YouTube for entertainment years ago. Try it!
(I still jump in for the occasional video tutorial etc but it’s always targeted - go for one thing, swoop in, close it when I’m done.
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There is some resurgence in quality here and there but then there is Avengers, MCU, Star Wars and idk how you can balance that with any amount of quality indie products
This might be (unintentionally?) part of the reason for the original subject: how many jobs does the Avengers IP pipeline support? How about for a single artifact output by it--one TV show, for example?
And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?
Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)
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The last Avengers movie was 7.5 years ago. The last Star Wars episode was 7 years ago. (The Mandalorian one is the only standalone one since then.) Avengers are included in the MCU btw. There have only been about 1 to 3 MCU movies per year for the last few years. (2022: 3; 2023: 3; 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 2). There are tons of other, really good movies to watch. Not just indies either: Did you happen to see Project Hail Mary this year? The Odyssey? I missed Spider-man: Brand New Day (the MCU movie that came out this year so far), but it has 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I don't think that drags down the average in terms of quality either.
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Vague takes like this scream Facebook boomer. There's lots of great media and lots of bad media. It's the nature of trying to monetize creativity.
What does this mean “to monetize creativity”?
Are you suggesting creatives just give their work away for free?
In contrast, thought-terminating clichés like "facebook boomer" show critical thinking on your part.
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Apparently you need a 10 K+ karma account to say the following (which another account, a new one and not mine btw, posted). Some I'm just reusing the other dude's words:
In contrast, thought-terminating clichés like "facebook boomer" show critical thinking on your part.
I fully agree with that: calling someone a "facebook boomer" is just plain pathetic.
(btw the boomers are my parents' generation: don't go thinking I take it personally. I'm a GenX'er and GenX'er are badass, which is why I don't give a flying fuck saying what I think).
Something something about the pot and calling some kettle black etc.
Some of these graphs don't support the hypothesis. The movie one for example shows that employment is just slightly below what it was just after the financial crisis of 2008, and shows record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
Apparently the amount of movies actually being produced has barely recovered to post 2008 levels.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187122/movie-releases-in...
Why should we expect the economy of 2026 (not 2020) be comparable to 2008? Am I missing something? Economy was awful i 2008 and we are currently in boom time markets, so boomy for so long that people have been saying it must be a bubble for years now.
> record job loss after the covid bump which we all know resulted in massive hiring sprees in a lot of sectors followed by massive layoffs. Is the movie and movie production sector really experiencing an apocalyptic downturn where the line will reach zero, or just returning to its median?
The 2023 Hollywood Strike strike, the COVID lockdowns shutting down theaters, and the aggressive film production (UK, Poland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Spain, Colombia) and VFX (Ireland, India, Colombia) subsidizes right as American states like California, Georgia, NY, and others began cutting them meant much of the American film and television industry got obliterated earlier this decade.
The reality is revenue is roughly consistent, but production costs one you remove subsidies (like what most of the US and Canada did) become exhorbitant in low margin industries like entertainment.
It's now cheaper to produce an "American" movie or TV show in Ireland, using British actors affecting an American accent (thank Hugh Laurie, Idris Elba, and Dominic West for that), with post and VFX done in India than it is in the US.
This is something that has been reported on in the space for a decade now, but not much can be done.
This article is also another example of why HNers should stick to their own lane, as most lack context or visibility into other industries.
Yeah but the total hours of content produced are way up. Most video content that needs to be produced and is consumed nowadays isn't movies.
That's part of the point. If anyone can create cheap garbage, flood it on socials, and get people to click see what goes viral the old attention economy is just totally disrupted
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Jobs might be down but the amount of money going to produce media, film, and "the arts" has never been higher. A lot of it is centralized but possibly these jobs have just shifted around to other roles and specialities.
The amount of video being produced has never been higher, as well.
Rise of influencers and content creators - less hollywood gatekeeping and more commoditizing the distribution of content across YT, Tiktok, instagram. Big names moving out of networks and into distribution channels they have more control over - making more content, more money, and with less resources.
> The streaming era has proven an extremely difficult transition, with traditional films and TV shows losing watch time to user-generated and increasingly AI-assisted or AI-generated content flows.
Isn’t this the wrong conclusion.
It’s that streaming as the monetization vehicle no longer creates an opportunity for movie maker to make huge returns.
Once, a blockbuster movie could make $1 billions.
Today, the movie maker only gets a sliver of the $12/mo subscription fee.
I think you’re both talking about the same issue though. They’re saying traditional film and tv is in competition with free media, UGC and whatnot. You said the same thing but using numbers.
The consumer behavior, or opportunity as you put it, that supported those billion dollar blockbusters has changed largely due to competing media. Film and TV are not the only show in town anymore.
There's so much talent overseas and it's so much cheaper. The entire reason for this change is the growth of remote work since COVID + economics.
> Take the unexpected resurgence in book sales
At least some of this will be AI companies buying and scanning every book available...
Mergers are also a huge factor, and the recent Warner/Paramount merger is going to cost a lot of jobs (even more so because the merged company will be so deeply in debt that it will have to aggressively cut expenses).
> overall job turnover rates remain extremely low
you have to be very careful quoting those sources that are based on incorrect data. One might have three jobs and make 5 times less than it used to be. It's a rabbit hole that needs its own thorough research.
The only thing I’ve been watching lately are Soviet films on youtube. Mosfilms and Gorky films have their full catalogs on there. Sergei Bondarchuk’s films are deeply moving. Seventeen Moments from Spring is incredible as well- the Soviet answer to James Bond. For some reason it feels deeply refreshing to watch these films instead of what the US has been producing.
When art offers one of the only limited pressure valves for totalitarianism out gets embued with deeper meaning I suppose?
All art in the Soviet Union was state-manipulated propaganda. At least all of it that was in public venues such as theatre and television.
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Around 2010–2012, I made videos for Vocaloid producers' songs in Japan. It was almost entirely unpaid. What I got out of it was skills.
My media diet has dropped steadily for 15 years now. I don’t know how much of it is just aging, and how much truly is tired/fatigue for the products offered. And the burden/complexity of streaming has basically just led me to throw my hands in the air and find other things to do. I already spend too much time tapping on my phone, much less watch yet another screen.
I’d just guess it’s close to none of the layoffs are AI. rather, in a world of anyone can broadcast to the world on YouTube the number of creators that can reach an audience has grown 10000x. The glut of content means far far less market to support the old media
AI is the perfect scapegoat.
Barclays laying off thousands in the UK obviously puts the decision on AI productivity gain.
How does one consider, depression, inflation, interest rates and investments, purchasing power, and other impactful economic downturns for such analysis? During this window a consequential war in Europe, another one in Iran leading to an energy crisis, has happened as well which could accelerate the existing trends in one way or the other. I think any serious comparison should control for these factors.
AI is decimating entertainment employment, just not in US, but in China.
Honestly I think it's because everything sucks these days. I know there is a lot of survivorship bias going on but _something_ has changed. I have recently been on a 1980-2010's movie binge. It seemed like movies before were raw and real. Now everything feels like it's plastic and made in a lab, dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
Don't even get me started on shows. There are a ton of great ones but now they have 2-4, sometimes even 5 year gaps! The "increased" quality doesn't warrant it! I know people say "well now they're movie-grade" but I really could not care less. I don't need every episode of every show to be blockbuster quality. Just make it not suck! I would love to go to the movies and buy all the subscription services but it's simply not worth it! /rant
There’s a very specific South Park episode that relates to this comment - “ You're Getting Old" (Season 15, Episode 7).
Very little. It's that America's tax incentives are not competitive. They fly crews to make game shows from LA to london because its cheaper to shoot a show there. There's strong momentum to change that at the moment, there's a bill that might actually get passed that will make the tax environment competitive again in the states that stack theirs on it.
Most of the jobloss seems to be due to the movie industry. The movie industry has been a flop machine over the last decade out side a handful of successes. That probably has more to do with jobloss than anything ai related.
Based on the rise of short form video content, this seems like amateurs are just outcompeting professionals for eyeballs.
Not even short form. I found myself watching an hour and a half long YT video of a dude jet skiing from WA state to Alaska and can’t even hype myself up to watch a feature film.
The other night I watched a team of 4 dudes row from America to Europe. In a row boat. No sails. Makes me think of the Tom Hanks quote:
> What actually happened is cooler than what could happen
It’s hard to think of a fictional story that beats actually rowing across the world.
While true, it’s almost like saying crack dealers are outcompeting Michelin chefs for appetites.
They are totally different content, and one inarguably more addictive and shallow than the other
But you’re right.
Seems things are starting to reverse and movies are picking back up again in various statistics. People want to see the movie everyone is talking about online and all over social media. Plus they make money directly through ticket sales not from the dubious assumptions behind social media ad conversions.
It's purely anecdotal, but the word I've heard from the industry is that the number of sfx and animation jobs had stayed the same, but the bids are coming in much much lower. The example was $500k jobs were now coming in around $50k.
Before I dive into a relatively long article here, can someone tell me if it does, in fact, say how much is AI?
Over on the entertainment side, video is getting really good. Yes, there's a huge amount of AI slop, but the good stuff is quite good.
- Kono Express. [1] Disney laid off an character animator from the Star Wars factory. The animator decided to see what was possible with the best modern tools. He's using both AI tools and Unreal Engine. There are six episodes now, and each one is a bit better than the last, as he gets a handle on the technology. The first episode looks like generic sci-fi stuff, at good quality but not yet perfect. By episode three, he has this nailed. It keeps getting better. Episode six [2] is a delight. He's now almost up to current Hollywood quality. One person, turning out half an hour of content every few weeks. Who needs Disney any more?
- Asian vertical dramas. 17,000 episodes per day. Apparently 55% of China's AI capacity is cranking these out. Search for "asian drama creation tools". Amusingly, Google and Bing have completely different tool lists. These are all software as a service products, with accounts and token charges. Currently, visuals are quite good, with some notable errors. Complex patterns on clothing don't stay consistent, for example. Continuity errors remain common. Automatically generated audio is currently terrible, at least in the English translations. Plots are so cliche that it's clear people are re-using the same prompts. "Heiress girl returns from countryside" is very popular. Here's a recent drama, about startup working hours.[3] The plot is silly but the visuals are OK.
- There's starting to be a thing for turning out movies based on old SF novels. So far, these seem unauthorized by the original author, but that will change. In time, every good book will have its movie.
The good stuff in this space is getting to be better than the Marvel Overexpanded Universe.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm5lP0zsi0
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XklUIGp6jH0
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7b9xNEkhlc
How much is TikTok?
More than you can afford if you have any scruples
Scruples likely has something to do with it, but not in the way you suggest. My feed is full of dancing and singing. Seeing a dance trend go viral and with 48 hours people all over the world are posting their rendition of it is remarkable.
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How much is your soul?
I think some of it may be demand side.
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.
This is my thinking. TikTok is very entertaining. I can’t do hours, but 30 minutes to an hour is great. Compare it to an unswipable hours long sporting event, 30 minutes looking for the right movie you quit 30 minutes in or have to pause till another day because something comes up, or tv shows with unresolved endings that leave you feeling like you are in a toxic relationship-hating the commitment but afraid of the sense of loss.
Habitual use of shorter and shorter form content trains you to expect gratification faster and faster. There is most certainly a better reward for delaying gratification. A really good movie can leave you on a complete high or completely devastated. I'm pretty certain tiktok cannot. It's cheap quick entertainment but if you get used to that fast shallow enjoyment you can't hold on long enough for the good stuff.
Something I realized recently was that when I watch videos in any form (feature film, documentary, dramatic or comedy series, or short) I have this nagging feeling I'm wasting time. I think it's because watching is such a passive activity.
When I read, I don't get that feeling. Even here on HN where it is mostly wasting time.
I think this is why so much media has viewer comments. It's something to engage with and lose awareness of the passing time.
> Media firms are decidedly coy about their AI use, both to protect against public backlash and, more financially important, to preserve the legal basis for their copyrights
Lying preserves the legal basis for copyright?
Maybe what that means is this: it's not illegal to lie about something being copyrighted (to discourage copying) if you don't actually take it as far as taking someone to court over it.
How much of this is globalization?
International media is much better than it used to be.
The outsource comment was interesting. Gaming didn't come up in this article but seems similarly hit. I was recently surprised to see how much game dev work is done outside the US for American companies.
Also thought the graphs around covid were interesting, there wasn't a spike up or anything it's just been consistently down.
The article said we're not in a recession. I thought we were lol
I avoid everything that was made with AI. Every video on YT gets a downvote having an AI created preview picture. I would not buy, watch such movies.
> In other words, the primary impacts of AI art will be on culture and society rather than the macroeconomy.
In that case we're in deep shit. It's already worrisome to see the effects that various technological "advances" (like smartphones) have had on culture and society. This is likely to make things even worse.
I find it odd that this article ignores live theater when that is the natural parallel to "live shows" or "tours" for film and television.
Also how much is the end of ZIRP and how much is jobs moving abroad? I'd love to see the article go a bit deeper
this is a terrible article, fire that writer
the media landscape has changed. youtube, tiktok, reels are the dominant media. the money the creators make there dwarfs this 200k loss of jobs.
The issue is, its global, creators aren't limited to desk jobs in america.
the article is interestingly made think more about the recent timeline since covid, sequential money printing bonanza followed by historical sacking of VC and all kind of money current AI bubble accelerated with faster job transfer to low income locations like India and overall “productivity gains” by the least competent corporate plankton with huge expertise devaluation
Honestly: our media and film is largely pretty terrible. The arts may be worth a lament.
I wish the article had split TV and movies because there are different factors at play.
Movies just don't make economic sense unless they're blockbusters and that's mainly because of the decline in movie theaters for various reasons but also the death of physical media sales. DVD sales in the 1990s were a bit of a Golden Age. Matt Damon talked about this [1].
Up until the 2000s the TV economic model was:
1. Produce a full season of TV, typically ~22 episodes, and air those on network TV. Sell ads;
2. Sell physical media. Unlike movies, this wasn't as big of a factor until serialized TV came about but it was a factor; and
3. Syndication. Basic cable channels and foreign distributors would pay to air TV shows.
Premium cable (eg HBO) was an exception. It still had foreign distribution but cable subscriptions replaced ad revenue.
In all of these cases, actors, writers, etc would get residuals or back end participation. For what became TV shows, there was a whole ecosystem of pilots. Scripts would be bought. Some would get greenlit for pilots. Some of those would get a half or full season order.
A TV season meant basically a full year of work for those involved. All the pilot activity meant more work. Residuals allowed actors and writers to survive between jobs. There are still people getting significant residuals from Friends from over 30 years ago.
All of that died with streaming. Netflix streaming first began as a means of monetizing old seasons of TV and older movies. It was additional revenue. But as Netflix grew, all the studios saw dollar signs and launched "me too" streaming services, most of which were doomed from the start. Streamers began to cannibalize the syndication and physical media revenue.
Netflix in particular made the decision relatively early that they needed original content to survive. By having a worldwide customer base, they didn't care about physical media and didn't have to pay for syndication. Also because of some unfortunate contracts in the late 2000s, there was little to no residuals for streaming so that too was more saved money.
And the cost-cutting continued. Smaller seasons (8-13 episodes) with smaller writing rooms meant fewer people employed, particularly when it might be 2-3 years between seasons. Suddenly you needed 2 jobs a year to survive where once it was 1. That's a huge difference because you're lucky to get 1 job. And you got no residuals on top of that.
This coincided with more general Hollywood cost-cutting to move productions out of LA to Canada (particularly Toronto but also Vancouver), Atlanta and elsewhere.
Hollywood was an ecosystem. Short term profit-seeking has basically destroyed it but also, so has the high cost of housing. LA used to be somewhere you could live cheaply and this enabled people to chase their dream. Many didn't make it but this was the entry to the funnel. Some did.
Now there are fewer jobs and those are increasingly dominated by second and third generation nepo babies.
Why do you think there's so much recycled IP now? Relaunches of 1990s and 2000s properties. The people involved are out of work. That's why. And it's easier to greenlight something with a track record. Also, notice how many podcasts there are of people who used to be in shows? The Office is particularly egregious for this. I swear half the cast have podcasts now. Why? Because they're out of work too.
I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood. Expensive housing is an input into everything you produce and do. Yet people see it as their retirement. What retirement? If your $200k house is now $1M, so is every other house. You still only own one housing unit's worth of wealth. So you need to multiple houses, to be a landlord or Airbnb host. And we wonder why the housing supply sucks.
[1]: https://streamable.com/pedvjq
> This coincided with more general Hollywood cost-cutting to move productions out of LA to Canada (particularly Toronto but also Vancouver), Atlanta and elsewhere.
> I cannot overstate how much expensive housing has strangled Hollywood.
I hardly know anything about the tv/movie industry, but this is a bit of funny juxtaposition when Toronto and Vancouver also have famously unaffordable housing.
AI is a definite possibility, part of it makes me wonder how much it's about the new skills needed for film/media are tied to technology or AI.
Technology has almost always been adopted in Hollywood.
Media grew to become social media, and skills of social media became relevant and new positions.
Ctrl+f, monopoly, zero results.
yeah, worthless analysis of side effects without taking into account any causation variable to anchor anything to anything.
Art is gatekept by distribution. You only pay artist because otherwise they will go independent or use the other studio/record-label/etc. It's the only reason artists got paid handsomely in the past.
Today, money only come from spotify, netflix, and soon one or two movie studios. News and Newspaper is already gone, it's past the point of monopoly and into billionaire personal toy.
This also answers why live performance is the only thing going up. It is the only thing that still require any choice from the artist. Everything else is give-me-or-media-or-else.
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